Giffgaff 5G coverage and roll-out

Last updated 18th March, 2024

Giffgaff 5G is available in all the same places as O2, meaning over 3,200 UK towns and cities at the time of writing. And as O2’s 5G coverage increases, Giffgaff’s will too.

Giffgaff launched its 5G service on October 20, 2020, which is almost exactly a year after O2 did, and while it has 5G coverage in a lot of places, you should be aware that this coverage is often patchy – but that’s the case with every network at the moment.

Below we’ve taken a closer look at Giffgaff’s 5G service, including the key places it’s available and how its coverage compares to other networks.

Giffgaff 5G summary

How does Giffgaff's 5G coverage compare to others?

We keep track of which networks offer 5G coverage across 120 major UK towns and cities, so you can see at a glance how they compare in key locations.

Giffgaff has the same number of locations as O2 below:

• O2 has launched 5G in 93 of the 120 locations below. 
• Three has launched 5G in 111 of the 120 locations below. 
• EE has launched 5G in 114 of the 120 locations below. 
• Vodafone has launched 5G in 92 of the 120 locations below. 

The chart below lists the locations in full, with a tick against them meaning a network has some coverage there. However, in many cases it won’t be complete coverage, so it’s worth using a network’s official coverage checker to see how patchy it is. Sometimes 5G coverage will also differ indoors and outside. That said, every network is improving its 5G coverage rapidly.

Latest locations to get Giffgaff 5G

Giffgaff relies on O2 for its 5G coverage, and the latest places to get O2 5G (as of March 2024) include Harrogate, Kirkcaldy, and Sutton.

Giffgaff coverage checker

You can use Giffgaff’s online coverage checker to see 5G, 4G, 3G and 2G coverage. Just type in your postcode or town to see details of coverage both indoors and out.

Many places still don’t have Giffgaff 5G coverage yet, so you should check your home, work, and anywhere else you’re likely to need 5G before buying a 5G phone or 5G SIM Only plan.

CHECK Giffgaff 5G coverage

4G coverage

Giffgaff of course also offers 4G, 3G and 2G coverage, and at the time of writing this will be a lot more widespread than 5G.

Giffgaff (through O2’s infrastructure and spectrum) has roughly 99% population coverage with 4G, which is broadly in line with rivals, as you can see below.

5G roaming abroad

Not many networks offer 5G roaming at the time of writing, but Giffgaff lets customers roam for free at slower speeds in many European destinations.

5G network speeds

We don’t have much information about Giffgaff’s 5G speeds yet, but the network has said you should be able to download an hour-long TV episode in around 17 seconds on average, or potentially as little as three seconds if you’re right by a mast.

Beyond that, we can look at data on O2’s speeds to get an idea, given that Giffgaff uses O2’s network. On that front, we have O2 data from RootMetrics for the second half of 2023, which found O2’s median 5G download speed was an unimpressive 68.7Mbps. The report also found that its 95th percentile speed (which would be close to the highest speed O2 recorded) was 301.2Mbps, and its 5th percentile one (meaning almost the lowest) was 4.2Mbps.

And we have an Opensignal report from September 2023, which found O2’s average 5G download speed to be 77.0Mbps. That notably is lower than Three, EE, or Vodafone’s results.

Speedtest meanwhile in a study from the second half of 2023 found that O2’s median 5G download speed was 70.43Mbps.

While those speeds are variable, they’re all a big upgrade on 4G, which averages 18.2Mbps on O2 according to an October 2020 Opensignal report. We’re using this older report because the newer ones don’t include speed results just for 4G.

Latency

Latency is how long a mobile network takes to respond to a request before it starts transferring data. So even with high speeds, if latency is also high it can make some things feel slow, even though it’s measured in milliseconds (ms).

Giffgaff hasn’t said anything about its 5G latency, but according to 2023 data from Speedtest, O2’s median 5G latency is 33ms. It’s been said though that eventually 5G could offer latency as low as 1ms. For reference, 4G latency tends to be around 30-50ms.

Giffgaff’s 5G frequency allocation

All mobile signals travel on frequencies, and for 5G it’s typically high frequencies that are used – as you can see in the chart above, Giffgaff uses the 3.4GHz band and the 3.6GHz band, both of which are higher than any it uses for 3G or 4G.

One reason for using higher frequency spectrum is that it’s available in greater capacities, which can help deal with lots of connections and big data demands – two things which are vital for a 5G network. The lower frequencies though can travel further and penetrate obstacles better.

Those advantages mean that Giffgaff (through O2) might also use some 700MHz spectrum for 5G, though at the time of writing this was only recently acquired at the second 5G spectrum auction, and it’s not currently clear what these networks will use it for.

Giffgaff through O2 has access to 40MHz of 3.4GHz spectrum and 40MHz of 3.6GHz spectrum at the time of writing, so that’s 80MHz in total, which is the same amount as EE but a little less than Vodafone’s 90MHz and much less than Three’s 140MHz. More is of course better in terms of network capacity.

That said, O2 has arranged to trade some of its spectrum with Vodafone, which won’t increase its holdings but will give it an 80MHz contiguous block, which helps deliver better network performance.

The 5G spectrum totals above don’t include the 700MHz spectrum since that may or may not end up being used for 5G, but if you factor that in then Giffgaff/O2 has 100MHz, EE (which has confirmed it will use this for 5G) has 120MHz, Three has 160MHz, and Vodafone still has 90MHz.

However, there may eventually be more spectrum auctioned off, so these totals could change.